A year ago today, Mellow Mike teamed up with local Salt Lake City hip hop group The Street Sweepers and Seattle based artist Grieves to produce the single “Men at Work”.

I need distraction in order to maintain consistency. I can’t be alone to linger in repetitive thoughts, especially when being creative. I need music and conversation and weed and coffee and movies and something cute to look at. All these things at once are ingredients to a recipe that I still have a hard time explaining.

“Making hip hop in Montana is very freeing. It’s quiet, vast isolation is poetic in nature and fulfilling to the soul. It’s comfort in silence and brings time to reflect properly. The freedom of boredom is what sparks our everyday life. After the chores and the shower and the screen time and the breakfast, there lies nothing. Just an endless field of self-expression and discovery. In that field lies the perfect version of ourselves, lying in the grass watching the clouds pass by. I learned over time to sit with this version of me in the rare instances we did meet, and simply write raps with him…”